"Many businesses still miss the valuable insights hiding in data on consumer behavior," I like this quote. Many business cannot understand the gravity of these data and what sort of actions they can take based on these.

Across company units, GE is a pioneer in what's commonly known as the Internet of things but which GE calls "the industrial Internet." Quick plug: At our InformationWeek Conference on April 1, we'll be interviewing GE Power's CIO, Jim Fowler, to get a reality check on the state of IoT applications at GE and elsewhere. http://www.informationweek.com/conference

1. The comment "you have to start with a hypothesis" kind of goes against the big data trend. With high-scale, low-cost platforms, you can capture all the data and use things like MapReduce and machine learning to uncover latent patterns. The idea of having to know what you're looking for in advance sounds like SQL-centric/relational thinking and is precicely what big data analysts are tyring to get away from.

2. From what I've heard, the likes of Boeing, GE, and the airlines they serve are ABSOLUTELY aware of the value of flight data. GE, for one, uses data streaming from many of its latest jet engines in service for prevantative maintenance. In fact, they're talking about moving to an engines-as-a-service model whereby airlines can subscribe to engines and GE takes care of keeping them in service. Boeing, Airbus and airlines also make extensive use of their flight data. Maybe they boil it down and throw away the oldest stuff, but there's no lack of awareness.

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.